Live: A Grab Bag of Radio Hit Makers for a Single Audience

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — Ask which pop acts have been most influential in each of the last two years, and the answers aren’t likely to include Jesse McCartney. And yet this young singer — pretty, agile, maturing — has been the only artist to perform in each of the last two years of Z100’s Zootopia, the pop station’s annual midyear roll call of current galvanizers, which took over the Izod Center here on Saturday night.

Is it his light, forceless voice? His practiced stardom shtick, a few notches more polished than his actual fame demands? His hair, which on Saturday recalled midperiod Frankie Muniz?

Maybe it’s just that he has the freest schedule. Each year Zootopia isn’t an exhaustive catalog as much as a compromise driven by shifting schedules and varying degrees of obligation. If pop itself is haphazard, Zootopia is selectively — or randomly — so.

Certain truths could be gleaned from this lineup, though: pop rewards the inventive but also the persistent. Counting out the once-successful is a losing game. Just ask the perennially maligned Black Eyed Peas, always a punch line but currently a punch line with one of the most vibrant songs of the year, “Boom Boom Pow,” a shock of electro-rap so convincing that it all but obliterates memories of their lesser hits.

The group closed the show on Saturday night with a dizzying performance on an outer space-theme set, ending with a serrate and aggressive “Boom Boom Pow.” But having made the leap from nuisances to innovators, they seemed equally likely to jump right back; their new single, “I Got a Feeling,” sounded inspired by Journey.

Photo

Zootopia, a concert sponsored by Z100 at the Izod Center in East Rutherford, N.J., featured Flo Rida. The Black Eyed Peas, Ciara and Kelly Clarkson were among the other acts.Credit
Rahav Segev for The New York Times

Fergie, the group’s singer, wore harem pants, a breast harness and electric blue Princess Leia earmuffs, her intergalactic hipster look a one-up on the postmillennial warrior aesthetic the R&B singer Ciara had worked earlier in the night. But Fergie sang well while Ciara mostly vamped, an erotic robot working through a list of commands. Her most human moment came at the close of her set, her heavy panting the loudest sound captured by her microphone all night.

As often happens, Zootopia was less eclectic than Z100’s own playlist. At the Izod Center there were no pop megastars (Britney Spears), no postdrag dance-pop (Lady Gaga), no Disney phenoms (Jonas Brothers), no electro-punk (3OH!3), no country crossover (Taylor Swift), no soft rock (the Fray). Between acts large screens played music videos of other station staples who were absent: Beyoncé, Ashley Tisdale, Ne-Yo.

Not that the show didn’t aim for diversity: the only genre represented in duplicate was Southern hip-hop, by the arriviste Soulja Boy and the cyborg Flo Rida. Soulja Boy’s performance was dispiriting, a chaotic mess undone by diffuse sound and the limits of charisma. By comparison Flo Rida’s professionalism was a relief. He attended to the crowd like a thoughtful mechanic.

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Equally at odds with the audience were the All-American Rejects, whose frontman, Tyson Ritter, lanky, shag-haired and lascivious, appeared woefully misplaced during the band’s perfunctory set. “You hungry?” he asked the aggregated teenage and preteen girls. “It’s supper time.”

Rock received better, and less unseemly, representation by Kelly Clarkson, by far the night’s best performer. Seven years after winning the first season of “American Idol,” she remains an astonishing talent. On epics of dissatisfaction like “Since U Been Gone” and “Never Again,” she was ferocious, howling her lyrics and trying out different inflections of words seemingly on the fly. But while her vocals were pristine, she didn’t much bother with presentation. She smiled and giggled earnestly, spoke directly to audience members and jumped all over the stage with none of the precision of, say, Ciara or Fergie.

Ms. Clarkson isn’t trying that hard, at least not in that way. Her continuing success affirms the power of big pop machines but also reminds of their idiosyncrasies. Should she not be back at Zootopia next year, it’ll just as likely be her rejecting the system as the system rejecting her. But to count her out altogether? That would be foolish.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page C7 of the New York edition with the headline: Live: A Grab Bag of Radio Hit Makers for a Single Audience. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe